Mental Health Court Turns Lives Around

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

Joe was a homeless gentleman who kept being picked up for trespassing at Crown Center, where he would sleep in a box on a corner in that area. Joe was not medication compliant and had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He was not engaged with any community-based behavioral health center except to go to Swope Health Services once a week to take a shower.  

A Crisis Intervention Team officer came to court to let the Mental Health Court team know that he felt Joe was decompensating. Outreach at Swope made contact with Joe and after several months of working with him on an intensive level, Joe was admitted to the Mental Health Court program. He graduated and now has stable housing, is medication compliant, has a case manager and has not had police contact since August 2012.

Our staff here at Legal Aid are always looking for the root cause of our clients’ legal problems and for ways we can solve related community problems. One shining example of this work is Mental Health Court in Kansas City.

Many of the defendants in Municipal Court in Kansas City have serious mental health problems that cause them to be homeless and often lead them to violate trespassing and other laws. It used to be that these defendants were in a constant cycle of going in and out of jail, while no one paid any attention to the real cause of the problem. While their mental health problem remained untreated the likelihood of them being able to stay out of jail was remote.

Working with the judges, court administration, prosecutors, mental health providers, the superintendent of the City jail and many others, Legal Aid collaborated to create one of the first Mental Health Court’s in the country. The Court now gives offenders with serious mental health problems the opportunity to go to treatment, rather than going to jail. To graduate from Mental Health Court participants have to stay on their medications, go to regular counseling sessions and not have any new charges filed against them for at least six months. If they graduate, the original charges that brought them into Court are dropped.

The results of the project are fantastic. Today, Mental Health Court has a 56% graduation rate and 89% of the detainees who graduate commit no further violations in the year after their release. Not only does this program improve safety in Kansas City, it also improves the quality of life for the defendants—allowing them to get their mental health issues under control and lead stable lives. Legal Aid has been similarly collaborative for Veterans Treatment Court and Drug Court. 

Ed Ford: 50th Anniversary Guest Blogger

Councilman Ed Ford, Kansas City Missouri City Council 

Councilman Ed Ford (circa 1979)

I started working for Legal Aid when I was a third year law student at UMKC (1977-1978), and upon graduation, was hired full-time. The Professional Building, Linwood Multipurpose Building (now the Mohart Center) and the Jackson County Juvenile Court were all places I called home during my Legal Aid tenure. I was a guardian ad litem for abused and neglected children, represented alleged mentally ill folks who were staving off commitment (back in the day before one had to be both mentally ill and dangerous to oneself or others) and worked on education issues of children with disabilities.

It was during these early years at Legal Aid that I was first introduced to City Government and its politics. In 1978, a fellow Legal Aid Attorney, Jerry Riffel, was running for KCMO City Council. Jerry was a long haired liberal leaning candidate who headed up Legal Aid's housing unit. None of us really thought Jerry had a chance as he was running against an “establishment” attorney, with plenty of campaign money and the support of the powerful Citizens' Association. To make it even more of an uphill battle, Jerry was running in-district for the affluent 4th district- the political heart of the city. Jerry and his team of volunteers staged an impressive grass roots campaign that outworked his opponent and ended up winning the Council seat in 1979. “Wow,” I thought. What a great city we lived in when someone like Jerry could get elected.

My final years with Legal Aid were spent at the South Office, where we represented our clients on a variety of issues including many landlord tenant matters. It became apparent that many of the legal issues that confronted our clients were primarily financial in nature. Clients were being evicted not because they were bad tenants but because they didn't have the money to pay the rent.  The South Office is where I first met an energetic minister by the name of Rev. Emmanuel Cleaver II who was advocating for the same folks Legal Aid was representing. 

My opportunity to serve as an elected official began when I was first elected to the KCMO City Council in 1995. I am now starting my 16th and final year (term limits). I have been privileged to serve with four Mayors including Kansas City's first African- American Mayor, Emmanuel Cleaver II, and its first woman Mayor, Kay Barnes.  I am proud of the progress we have made in many areas of Kansas City, especially Downtown and in the Northland. Unfortunately, the problems of poverty, crime and racism continue to hold back progress in other areas, especially the urban core. 

I still believe in Legal Aid and its mission. I continue to be an advocate for Legal Aid funding recognizing its great work in neighborhoods, housing issues and municipal court. If it wasn't for my time at Legal Aid, I don't believe I would have run for City Council. I still practice law with a small firm in Kansas City North and am pleased to be a part of the Volunteer Attorney Project (VAP).

[In celebration of Legal Aid of Western Missouri's 50th anniversary, we will feature guest bloggers. If you have Legal Aid memories or reflections you would like to share in a guest post, please contact Karen Cutliff - kcutliff@lawmo.org.)

Scooter Commuters

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

I’m working on becoming a scooter-commuter. This spring I started riding a scooter to work once or twice a week.  Over the summer, I’ve racked up over 1,000 scooter miles and my goal is to ride it over 2,000 miles per year. If you drive down Gillham Road during rush hour, I’m the guy with a button down shirt and khaki’s riding a little, red, Buddy scooter.

I figure that scootering combined with my switch to a Prius will save about 250 gallons of gas per year. By itself that won’t have a lot of impact on global warming, depletion of fossil fuels and U.S. energy dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

But, if you think of 1,000 K.C. area commuters making a similar switch (that’s well under 1% of the commuting population), then we’d be talking about saving a quarter million gallons a year. And if the same change happened in 50 other cities around the country, then we’d be turning at least a few super-tankers of oil back to the Middle East every year.  The price of oil might even go down and the air might just be a little easier to breath.

That’s a nice thought to enjoy while I scooter around.

A New Player Joins the Fight to Save KC's Urban Core

Gregg Lombardi-Executive Director

Odds are that you saw last week that the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce has announced a major urban core initiative to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods along the Troost Street Corridor from 21^st Street to 51^st Street.

The Chamber’s focus on this work is fantastic news. The Chamber and its members have access to tremendous resources and the ability to influence major decision-makers in a way that can help transform these neighborhoods. 

Legal Aid has been doing community development work to improve these neighborhoods for more than 25 years. Every year we work with neighborhood associations, the City, individual homeowners and other not-for-profits to transform 80-100 blighted and abandoned properties in the urban core of Kansas City into high quality, occupied, tax-paying housing. That work has been critical in helping neighborhoods like the Ivanhoe neighborhood greatly improve themselves and in keeping other neighborhoods that will be a part of the Chamber initiative from falling into irreversible disrepair.

Because of limits on our resources, however, the work that we do leaves thousands of blighted and abandoned properties untouched.  According to the most conservative estimates, there are now approximately 7,000 abandoned properties in the City’s urban core. 

So, having the Chamber join the fight is a breath of fresh air.  We will collaborate with the Chamber and its partners in every way that we can to make sure that the new urban core initiative is a success.  As part of this, among other things, we will assist in acquiring blighted properties for rehab for Chamber projects. We will also recruit for-profit law firms to work on the project on a pro bono basis. 

We welcome the Chamber to the battle against urban core blight in Kansas City and look forward to working with them on their wonderful, new initiative.